A Better Follow Friday

Follow Friday is a common practice on Twitter where many people spend friday posting things like #FF @aplusk @guykawasaki …  This practice is distracting at best and fails to accomplish the single purpose it intends. Follow friday began as way to share lesser known twitter users with your community. A great idea that quickly grew out of control. I propose a better implementation that will not only accomplish the original intent but will do so in a non-distrcting manner by leveraging twitter lists. I propose that any individual that wants to share their recent finds, favorite follows or other gems create a list called “recommends”. Keep a handful of people on this list. Cycle them out as often as you like. You can find mine at@spf13/recommends

This is a substantial improvement over follow friday.

1. It doesn’t litter statuses with a list of random names every Friday.
2. It stream lines the process of actually following those people. In the current approach one would need to click through to every single name in the list, often approaching dozens, and view their twitter page to evaluate whether they were follow worthy. The new approach, groups all of them on a single page and allows you to view a set of their tweets, not just in a instant, but over time. From this single page/view it’s much easier to follow individuals from there.
3. People will actually use it. I don’t know of anyone who has the time to actually click through each of the thousands of names that are posted every Friday. By grouping them and keeping it around everyday, not just friday, people will actually use it.

Sometimes pictures speak louder than words.

Here’s the current approach. It expects us to click through each of those names and evaluate them in a moment. Does anyone actually do this anymore?

Rather than littering your status with a list of names, add them to your “recommends” list. Interested parties can follow your list and not only see the names, but actually what they are tweeting. If they find them interesting then it’s easy to follow them from there.

As a disclaimer, I photoshopped this to include a better mix of tweeets in a single screen.

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